Self-driving cars are now an engineering problem, not a research problem—the question is no longer 'can it happen' but 'who can drive down cost per mile to the point where OEMs can deploy it at scale across their thin margins.'
The industry has settled the question of whether self-driving works; the remaining challenge is grinding down cost per mile so that OEMs with razor-thin margins can deploy it across their entire product lines by the early 2030s. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 (Qasar Younis) · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-21 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 39:00
You know what we're not debating about? Is it gonna happen? Is there a big technical breakthrough that needs to happen? None of those things. So now we're clearly in the engineering side of self-driving, which is just this grind down to dollar per mile efficiency. And the moment that it's cheap, guess what? All the OEMs are smart. They'll just adopt it. It's not the OEMs are resistant because they don't think consumers want it or they don't understand the technology. It's because they want a price envelope which allows them to keep their thin razor thin margins.
verbatim transcript · starts at 39:00
38:43self-driving. Whimo for the lack of a better word is not that. It's not doesn't mean they're not learned. It does it just there's not one endto-end system. It's not one monolithic model. Um, one of the proclivities of that their approach is it does depend on HD maps. Therefore, there is a geo fencing concept. I think Whimo is trying hard to remove that bottleneck so they can expand geographically faster. But the
39:05reality of today isn't there. The other thing is when you have researchers, which they which really was uh coming out of uh an alphabet research uh organization, they didn't put commercial constraints. So, the sensors are bespoke and expensive. The cars and the than the compute that are in there, they're they're just not economically feasible. And they've tried a lot to get that down. But, it's kind of like it's a lot
39:28easier to go from something that's really cheap and make it more uh, you know, more featureful than something that's overbuilt and then trying to trim and make it really, really cheap. And that's the big debate. Who's going to get there first? Tesla with full self-driving or Whimo with cost and geographic ubiquity. Uh, but you know what we're not debating about? Is it gonna happen, >> right? >> You know what we're not debating about?
39:49Like is is is there a big technical breakthrough that needs to happen? None of those things. So now we're clearly in the engineering side of self-driving, which is just this grind down to like dollar per mile efficiency. And the moment that it's cheap, guess what? All the OEMs are smart. They'll just they just adopt it. It's not the OEMs are resistant because they don't think consumers want it or they don't
40:11understand the technology. It's because they want a price envelope which allows them to keep their thin razor thin margins and at a scale right >> which is deployed across 100 plus countries in V1 right >> and so if you're just doing a small deployment it's very different and I think and and that was the last thing I would say is the buyer of a Subaru >> or a buyer of a Suzuki have very
40:36different brand expectations that a buyer of a Tesla >> and so including the age of the consumer and what they think will happen and won't happen. Um, so that that also the reason. So if you're a Suzuki, you're like, well, my buyer is like not doesn't want this stuff, so I'm not going to jam it into the car. It's not because they're not like technically competent. It's just a different area.